A Joke on Twitter, A Year in Labor Camp?

That’s the message the Chinese government is sending after the latest free speech incident involving a Chinese woman sentenced to a year in labor camp for re-posting a message on Twitter.

The woman, Cheng Jianping, and her fiancé were offering ironic suggestions about how the nation’s youth should respond to the latest diplomatic flare-up between China and Japan.

Cheng is known in China as an online activist who has previously voiced support for the imprisoned Nobel Prize winner Lu Xiaobo and jailed consumer rights advocate Zhao Lianhai, according to Amnesty International.

The human rights group issued a statement earlier this week calling for Cheng’s release, nearly one month after she was first detained by police.

Cheng disappeared on the evening of her wedding on Oct. 27, 2010, ten days after re-posting a sardonic message to Twitter suggesting that Chinese citizens attack the Japanese Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo as a response to the territorial dispute over contested islands that was ongoing at the time.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Cheng was taken into custody on the 27th and has since been sentenced to one year of “re-education through labor” for “disturbing social order,” the international human rights group said.

She is the latest critic of the Communist Party to be jailed in Beijing’s ongoing campaign against political dissent—a campaign that has seemed to grow more intense since jailed dissent Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month. While many have been detained for seemingly minor infractions, Cheng appears to be the first in the latest crackdown to be punished for appreciating an ironic joke.

“Sentencing someone to a year in a labor camp, without trial, for simply repeating another person’s clearly satirical observation on Twitter demonstrates the level of China’s repression of online expression,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Director for the Asia-Pacific.

According to Amnesty International, re-education through labor is an administrative punishment that can be used to hold a person for up to four years solely on the basis of a police decision and without access to a trial by an independent court.

The original post was written by Cheng’s fiancé Hua Chunhui, as a tongue-in-cheek criticism of nationalist youth across China who were boycotting Japanese products and attacking Japanese-owned businesses to show their solidarity with the Chinese government as it scuffled with Japan over the islands, known as Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese.

Here is the translated text of the offending post: “Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago by Guo Quan. So it’s no new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you’d immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion.”

Guo Quan is a Chinese government activist and is considered to be an expert on the Nanjing Massacre, which occurred during World War II.

Using the Twitter identifier ‘wangyi09’, Cheng re-posted the comment and added the words “Angry youth charge!”

According to press reports, her fiancé was also detained, but has since been released.

The micro-blogging service Twitter is popular among political activists in China, despite the fact that it is officially blocked in the country, and is only accessible through proxy web services that re-route a user’s to access the Web beyond China’s “Great Firewall.”

The artist and social critic Ai WeiWei, among the most enthusiastic Twitterers in China, used the service to organize a demonstration in Shanghai this month to protest the destruction of a studio he had built there.

In response to a number of reports detailing China’s methods of online censorship, Beijing released a white paper earlier this year that insisted Chinese citizens are guaranteed “freedom of speech on the Internet.” Satire, it would seem, does not qualify.

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